Proposed annexation of Santo Domingo

The proposed annexation of Santo Domingo was an attempted treaty during the later Reconstruction era, with precedents under earlier administrations, but re-initiated by United States President Ulysses S. Grant in 1869, to annex Santo Domingo (as the Dominican Republic was commonly known) as a United States territory, with the promise of eventual statehood. President Grant feared some European power would take the island country in violation of the Monroe Doctrine. He privately thought annexation would be a safety valve for African Americans who were suffering persecution in the U.S., but did not include this in his official messages. Grant also believed that the acquisition of Santo Domingo would help bring about the end of slavery in Cuba and elsewhere. The proposal to annex Santo Domingo aligned with a broader US foreign policy strategy in the Reconstruction era, including pursuit of new markets in the Caribbean to absorb the increasing industrial output of American businesses. The island's raw material wealth made it an attractive prospect for the U.S. commercial interest of seeking economic expansion in the region.

In 1869, Grant commissioned his private secretary Orville E. Babcock and Rufus Ingalls to negotiate the treaty of annexation with Dominican president Buenaventura Báez. A treaty was drafted by Secretary of State Hamilton Fish that included the annexation of the country itself and the purchase of Samaná Bay for two million American dollars. Also included and supported by Grant was the provision that the Dominican Republic could apply for statehood.

The annexation process drew controversy: opponents Senator Charles Sumner and Senator Carl Schurz denounced the treaty vehemently, alleging it was made only to enrich private American and island interests and to politically protect Báez. Sumner believed that Baez was a corrupt despot and that the use of the U.S. Navy by Grant during the treaty negotiation to protect the Dominican Republic from invasion by neighbouring Haiti while the annexation process took place, was illegal. Summer claimed that annexationists wanted the whole island and would absorb the independent black nation of Haiti. He, along with Schurz, also opposed mixed-race people becoming U.S. citizens. Both men used arguments linking climate and race, stating that to annex the tropical area of Santo Domingo would be damaging to the Anglo Saxons of the U.S, who were more suited to temperate climates, and to the black people of Santo Domingo, who they believed were more suited to tropical climates. A plebiscite ordered by Báez, who believed the Dominican Republic had better odds of survival as a U.S. protectorate and could sell a much wider range of goods to the U.S. than could be sold in European markets, registered an improbably low 11 votes against annexation, compared to over ten thousand for annexation. The country's unstable history was one of invasion, colonization, and civil strife

The treaty ultimately failed to reach the two-thirds vote needed under the Treaty Clause (the vote was a tie). In order to vindicate the failed treaty annexation, Grant sent a committee, authorized by Congress and including African American Frederick Douglass, that investigated and produced a report favorable to annexation of the Dominican Republic into the United States. However, the annexation treaty ultimately failed because there was little support for it outside Grant's circle. The defeat of the treaty in the Senate directly contributed to the division of the Republican party into two opposing factions during the presidential election of 1872: the Radical Republicans (composed of Grant and his loyalists) and the Liberal Republicans (composed of Schurz, Sumner, Horace Greeley as presidential candidate, and other opponents of Grant).